Sr. Director, Back-End Engineering
Coupang · Seoul
Job Description – Sr. Director, TestOps
Coupang operates a large distributed technology ecosystem where changes must be validated quickly, safely, and repeatedly across infrastructure and application boundaries. We are seeking a Director, TestOps to build and lead testing as a platform capability. This leader will own test automation, test environments and data, integration testing, resilience validation, quality signals, and AI-assisted testing. The mission is to move testing from a manual phase owned independently by teams into an automated, federated, and measurable platform that enables safe continuous delivery. We are looking for a visionary quality-platform leader who has previously built and scaled comparable TestOps, test infrastructure, or continuous-quality systems in a leading global technology company.
Key Responsibilities
- Set a bold vision for testing as a company-wide platform capability and translate that vision into an executable roadmap adopted across infrastructure and domain organizations.
- Define and execute the TestOps strategy across Tech Infrastructure and partner engineering organizations.
- Build a federated testing platform that supports infrastructure, platform, API, UI, integration, resilience, and release validation.
- Create repeatable test capabilities for Unified Staging and production-like environments.
- Partner with Developer Platform, SRE, Observability, Security, and domain teams to embed quality gates into delivery workflows.
- Own testing metrics including coverage, pass rate, escaped defects, flaky tests, execution time, environment readiness, and release confidence.
- Drive adoption through product management, customer enablement, documentation, office hours, and clear service-level objectives.
Test Platform & Automation
- Build self-service test planning, execution, orchestration, reporting, and evidence-management capabilities.
- Automate UI, API, service integration, infrastructure integration, and end-to-end test execution.
- Provide reusable test harnesses, reference applications, simulators, mocks, and service-virtualization capabilities.
- Integrate TestOps with CI/CD, Global CD, Application Registry, observability, and release governance.
- Create quality gates that are risk-aware, fast, deterministic, and appropriate to service tiers.
- Reduce flaky tests, duplicated frameworks, manual validation, and fragmented tooling.
Unified Staging, Test Data & Resilience Validation
- Use Unified Staging as the default environment for validating Tech Infrastructure components and domain applications.
- Build compliant, desensitized, production-like test data generation and lifecycle management.
- Enable integration testing across identity, mesh, networking, databases, queues, storage, observability, and application dependencies.
- Partner with SRE to automate fault injection, DR scenarios, failover validation, load testing, and reliability certification.
- Ensure validation evidence can feed release decisions, RBD/RBO certification, and executive reliability metrics.
AI-Assisted Testing
- Build AI-assisted capabilities for feature test-plan generation, test-case generation, test-data generation, execution, failure analysis, and defect triage.
- Establish evaluation, safety, and quality mechanisms for AI-generated tests and recommendations.
- Use production telemetry and incident learnings to continuously improve test coverage and prioritize high-risk scenarios.
- Automate quality insights and next-best-action recommendations for engineers and release owners.
Talent Leadership & Organization
- Lead managers, technical leads, and senior engineers across test platform, automation, and quality engineering.
- Own organization design, hiring, leadership development, and succession planning.
- Build a strong engineering culture focused on platform products rather than manual test execution.
- Develop leaders who can independently own federation, test infrastructure, AI TestOps, and resilience validation.
- Attract engineers with deep test infrastructure, distributed systems, developer tooling, and automation expertise.
Technical Leadership & Architecture
- Own architecture for test orchestration, environment integration, test data, result storage, quality signals, and release gating.
- Define company standards for test APIs, frameworks, evidence, coverage, flakiness, and service-tier validation.
- Influence platform architecture to improve testability, observability, fault isolation, and safe deployment.
- Align test strategy with the broader observability and AIOps architecture so pre-release and post-release quality signals reinforce one another.
Execution & Impact
- Deliver measurable reductions in manual testing, execution time, escaped defects, flaky tests, and release-related incidents.
- Increase automated integration and resilience validation across Tier 0, Tier 1, and Tech Infrastructure services.
- Improve release confidence and developer productivity through reliable self-service testing.
- Establish strong execution mechanisms, customer feedback loops, and objective quarterly targets.
Essential Qualifications
- Leadership experience in a best-in-class test infrastructure, developer productivity, continuous delivery, or reliability engineering organization at hyperscaler, global consumer platform, or similarly scaled technology company.
- Experience with Kubernetes, cloud-native testing, service mesh, fault injection, or chaos engineering.
- Experience building AI-assisted test generation or failure-analysis systems.
- Experience with load testing, DR validation, release certification, or production-readiness programs.
- 12+ years of experience in software engineering, test infrastructure, developer productivity, quality engineering, or platform engineering.
- 5+ years leading engineering teams and managers in a large-scale technology environment.
- Recognized as a strong technology and organizational leader with the ability to define a differentiated quality engineering vision, attract exceptional talent, and influence senior stakeholders.
- Demonstrated experience personally leading the architecture, build-out, launch, and scaled adoption of a TestOps, test infrastructure, continuous-quality, or release-validation platform.
- Experience building test automation or testing platforms for distributed systems and continuous delivery.
- Deep understanding of CI/CD, test environments, test data, integration testing, reliability testing, and quality metrics.
- Experience driving cross-organizational adoption of common platforms and standards.
- Strong technical judgment, customer focus, and ability to translate strategy into measurable delivery.